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Intel may have been late to the mobile party, but the chip giant is determined to close the gap with competitors by leveraging its manufacturing capabilities, IP portfolio, and a newfound commitment to pushing out "bleeding edge" wireless solutions.

But can Intel really play catch-up with the likes of Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Samsung at the pace new CEO Brian Krzanich promised upon taking the helm in May? This week, in a briefing with journalists and analysts, the company's mobile team laid out its LTE strategy, a crucial part of the overall plan to take a leadership position in the mobile device market after years on the sidelines.

By the end of August, Intel will be one of just two chip makers shipping a low-power, multimode, multiband 4G LTE modem capable of Voice-over LTE (VoLTE), the Intel XMM 7160.

Intel unveiled that chipset for LTE/DC-HSPA+ smartphones at this year's Mobile World Congress, so it's not exactly big news. What is an interesting development is that the chip giant said this week that it's still not sure if it will produce the XMM 7160 in volume or wait for the next-generation XMM 7260, due out in the first half of 2014, to make its first big push into radio frequency (RF) chipset production.

More on that in a bit.

Life as the Underdog
The upshot of all this is that Intel, long a dominant player in the PC industry, now finds itself in the strange position of being a scrappy underdog in mobile, according to Aicha Evans, general manager of wireless platforms research and development at Intel and a vice president in the company's Mobile and Communications Group.

"This is the first time I've been at Intel that the industry is actually rooting for us to succeed, because of a desire for plurality and diversity in this market," said Evans, who hosted the briefing on Intel's wireless communications and LTE strategy this week at the company's Santa Clara, Calif. headquarters.

But to challenge mobile industry leaders like Qualcommthe other vendor with a VoLTE-capable, multimode RF solution currently on the marketIntel will have to step up its game and its pace of innovation considerably, she said.

Intel has to get over two main hurdles, technology- and marketing-wise. Most mobile devices aimed at consumers use application processors based on ARM's microarchitecture rather than Intel's x86-based Atom chips. Intel has put in considerable effort to catch up with ARM on power consumption and is pitching the heck out of its Atom Systems-on-a-Chip (SoCs) as legit ARM alternatives. But that's not the chip giant's most pressing challenge in squaring off against the established mobile players.

After all, Intel knows how to build computing engines and has shipped more than 1 billion SoCs over the past several years. The chip giant also knows how to do Wi-Fi, with 13 years and change in mobile tech development and as Evans said, Wi-Fi isn't going anywhere and remains a key pillar of mobile device connectivity.

Cellular radios? That's a different story.

As Evans noted, "everything that computes must connect," and that goes double for mobile devices. Integrating RF components on mobile chipsets is a must and Intel only got serious about that with the acquisition of Infineon's wireless chip business a couple of years ago.

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals.
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